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Strategic sequential voting in multi-issue domains and multiple-election paradoxes

Published: 05 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

In many settings, a group of voters must come to a joint decision on multiple issues. In practice, this is often done by voting on the issues in sequence. We model sequential voting in multi-issue domains as a complete-information extensive-form game, in which the voters are perfectly rational and their preferences are common knowledge. In each step, the voters simultaneously vote on one issue, and the order of the issues is given exogenously before the process. We call this model strategic sequential voting.
We focus on domains characterized by multiple binary issues, so that strategic sequential voting leads to a unique outcome under a natural solution concept. We show that under some conditions on the preferences, this leads to the same outcome as truthful sequential voting, but in general it can result in very different outcomes. In particular, sometimes the order of the issues has a strong influence on the winner. We also analyze the communication complexity of the corresponding social choice rule.
Most significantly, we illustrate several multiple-election paradoxes in strategic sequential voting: there exists a profile for which the winner under strategic sequential voting is ranked nearly at the bottom in all voters' true preferences, and the winner is Pareto-dominated by almost every other alternative. We show that changing the order of the issues cannot completely prevent such paradoxes. We also study the possibility of avoiding the paradoxes for strategic sequential voting by imposing some constraints on the profile, such as separability, lexicographicity or O-legality.

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  • (2023)Convergence of multi-issue iterative voting under uncertaintyProceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.24963/ijcai.2023/310(2783-2791)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2023
  • (2021)Sequential Mechanisms for Multi-type Resource AllocationProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3463952.3464092(1209-1217)Online publication date: 3-May-2021
  • (2021)Complexity Results for Preference Aggregation over (m)CP-nets: Max and Rank VotingArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2021.103636(103636)Online publication date: Nov-2021
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cover image ACM Conferences
EC '11: Proceedings of the 12th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
June 2011
384 pages
ISBN:9781450302616
DOI:10.1145/1993574
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 05 June 2011

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Author Tags

  1. multi-issue domains
  2. multiple-election paradoxes
  3. social choice
  4. strategic voting

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EC '11
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EC '11: ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
June 5 - 9, 2011
California, San Jose, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 664 of 2,389 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Convergence of multi-issue iterative voting under uncertaintyProceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.24963/ijcai.2023/310(2783-2791)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2023
  • (2021)Sequential Mechanisms for Multi-type Resource AllocationProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3463952.3464092(1209-1217)Online publication date: 3-May-2021
  • (2021)Complexity Results for Preference Aggregation over (m)CP-nets: Max and Rank VotingArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2021.103636(103636)Online publication date: Nov-2021
  • (2020)Multi-issue social learningMathematical Social Sciences10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2020.01.006Online publication date: Jan-2020
  • (2018)Strategic VotingSynthesis Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning10.2200/S00849ED1V01Y201804AIM03812:2(1-167)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2018
  • (2017)Uniform random generation and dominance testing for CP-netsJournal of Artificial Intelligence Research10.5555/3176788.317680659:1(771-813)Online publication date: 1-May-2017
  • (2014)The complexity of online manipulation of sequential electionsJournal of Computer and System Sciences10.1016/j.jcss.2013.10.00180:4(697-710)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2014
  • (2013)Collective decision making: a great opportunity for constraint reasoningConstraints10.1007/s10601-013-9153-319:2(186-194)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2013
  • (2012)Paradoxes of multiple electionsProceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning10.5555/3031843.3031866(179-187)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2012
  • (2010)Comparing multiagent systems research in combinatorial auctions and votingAnnals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence10.1007/s10472-010-9205-y58:3-4(239-259)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2010

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